It was only a few weeks ago that Nvidia unleashed the brand-new line of RTX Super graphics cards to much industry praise. And to no one’s surprise, we are now seeing OEM manufacturers announcing their own cards, but you can bet not many of them will be liquid-cooled.
Aorus just unveiled not one but two liquid-cooled GeForce RTX 2080 Super graphics cards with built-in Waterforce cooling system. The Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Super Waterforce 8G and the Aorus GeForce RTX 2080 Super Waterforce WB 8G are the two models.
Notice the ever-so-slight difference in names? Well the Waterforce 8G features a “pre-assembled and pre-filled liquid solution” that’s easy to install. The Waterforce WB 8G on the other hand has a water block which you can connect to your own preferred liquid-cooling solution.
Except for that, both cards are similar across all specs. They are both built around the latest RTX 2080 Super chipset with a boosted clock speed of 1860MHz; Nvidia’s reference cards run at 1815MHz. The cards retain the same 8Gb GDDR6 of RAM but run at 496GB/s over a 256-Bit memory bus which promises improved performance over the reference cards.
Aorus claims these cards are built for “extreme overclocking” in great part thanks to the liquid cooling and a 12+2 phase power. Indeed this gives some extra wiggle room to eke out even more performance, but we will have to test that to know for sure.
Aorus has added two extra HDMI ports to the standard video output ports, giving a total of seven ports. However, the cards can only power four monitors at a single time and only in these two configurations; 3x HDMI mode or 3x DP mode. The 3x HDMI mode outputs video via 3 HDMI, one DisplayPort, and one USB-C, while the 3x DisplayPort mode lets you use three DisplayPorts, one HDMI, and one USB-C for video output.
And of course, being a premium gaming product, the Aorus comes standard with RGB Fusion 2.0 lighting to compeiment your system’s lighting customizations. Featuring 16.7 million customizable colors and several lighting effects, the Aorus cards can also be synchronized with other Aorus devices. The Aorus Waterforce 8G variant has RGB Fusion lighting on its two massive 120mm fans.
If all this wasn’t enough to pique your interest, Aorus is also throwing an extra year of warranty into the pot. That is on top of the standard three-year warranty. Buyers will need to register their purchase on the Aorus website within 30 days of purchase in order to claim the extra warranty.
At the time of publishing, Aorus had not released pricing or availability for the two cards, but expect a price range starting at about $700 up. We will update this article as and when Aorus reveals more.
